Yavapai Culture Department

Mission-Purpose --

Calendars --

Each department maintains of monthly calendar of activities. As these calendars change almost daily, visit the Center for the most recent version.

Engaging Community --

Yavapai Culture's goal is to engage the community by providing positive learning experiences for elders, youth, and families. The department focuses on the "CAL Experience: Culture, Arts, and Language."

To that end, a variety of workshops, classes, and language learning activities take place at the Culture Center. As well as, community activites such as Abaja Fridays, Language Fairs, Food Expos, Family Fun Day, and Storytelling Events.

We are the Yavapai People --

The modern Yavapai-Apache Nation is the combination of two distinct tribal people. The Yavapai refer to themselves as Yavþe or Wipuhk’abah for those living in this specific area. Both of our ancestral tribes lived in the Verde Valley and the surrounding country for centuries.

Today we live together as the Yavapai-Apache Nation. Our reservation is comprises of five separate parcels: Camp Verde, Middle Verde, Tunlii, Rimrock, and Clarkdale.

We have always lived here in the Verde Valley… we have no migration story. We traveled freely over our lands, leaving little trace for anyone to find later. Families and small groups (bands) moved seasonally following the resources in a pattern that had been successful for centuries.

Today, the Yavapai have embraced the modern world, while still living our culture. We are a strong and courageous people, who will live on in the Verde Valley for many more generations.

Language Preservation, Revitalization, & Instruction --

Our Yavapai language is dissappearing at an alarming rate and Yavapai Culture is working to preserve, revive, and to teach the language. Therefore, teaching, preserving and reviving the language is Yavapai Culture's highest priority.

Workshops & Classes --

The Culture Center has always focused on providing interesting workshops for the community. Planning for workshops seeks to provide positive energy through bring back custom that are dissappearing through disuse, bring back dances and songs, and bringing the old stories back into use. These are some of the workshops we offer...

Traditional Foods, Medicine, & Ethnobotany

Harvesting traditional foods has long been a part of Yavapai Culture. But over time, many of the foods have disappeared, or have been forgotten. Yavapai Culture is seeking to expand its knowledge of traditional foods and medicines and bring them back into use.

Harvesting trips will be planned throughout the year for food gathering...

Yavapai Culture seeks to work with the Youth Group's Traditional Garden and the YAN Agriculture Department to grow and provide traditional foods.

Harvesting trips for medicinal plants, then workshops in processing, storage and use.

Ethnobotany --

Future plans for more work in ethnobotany... building the database of useful plants, producing calendars and books of traditional plant use.

Re-Constructing History --

Unfortunately, history is often written by the conquerors. At Yavapai Culture we are striving to write our own version of history... through oral histories, personal reflections, writings proven to be accurate, and through viable sources.